Don't close your eyes to India's reality, Brangelina

I'm not surprised Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are reportedly planning to tie the knot in the regal city of Jodhpur.

Like Russell Brand and Katy Perry, Liz Hurley and Arun Nayar, they can't resist the magic of an Indian wedding.

But while westerners are spellbound by the sight of the beautifully adorned and painted bride as she demurely steps around the sacred flame, do they understand the unspoken logic behind all this perfection?

Given that she'll probably spend the rest of her life sexually unfulfilled and living subserviently with her in-laws, it's only fair to make a gigantic fuss of the poor girl on her big day. Western women may love the exquisite rituals of a traditional Indian wedding but they'd never stand for a traditional Indian marriage.

Some westerners have long tried to hide their vacuity behind a superficial dabbling with Indian culture. London's yoga classes teem with bendable neurotics suffering miserable eating disorders which they call an "ayurvedic diet". And Brad and Angie's wedding, like Gwyneth Paltrow's mystical prattlings and Russell Brand's pseudo-Hinduism, is an example of celebrities donning a thin veil of Indianness in the hope that we'll stop regarding them as airheads and realise that they are, in fact, really deep.

For India is a spiritually powerful place. The full spectacle of human life — kindness, cruelty, wealth, poverty, hi-tech modernity and backward antiquity — is played out in the open. The range of emotions you experience there as a visitor in a single day, from rage to despair, melancholy to awe, is so much greater than you feel at home in London. Recognising the terrible fragility and immense strength of the human condition enlightens you far more than any spell in an ashram.

But will Brad and Angie think about the heartbreaking paradoxes of Indian life during their sumptuous Rajasthani wedding? Will they contemplate how the thin, mustachioed servants serving the canapés earn less each year than the price of a simple dinner in a Hollywood restaurant? Will they consider how, while their own kids run playfully through the palace halls, within a stone's throw of the festivities there will be children working to keep their families from hunger? Poverty is never far away in India.

Yet Indians excel at insensitive hypocrisy too. The middle classes routinely pay their staff a pittance and expect wretched obedience, making servants stay up all night just to open a front door for them, or waking them up to fetch and drive them home when a cab costs almost nothing.

Being a guilt-ridden westerner, I employed only a cleaner when I lived in Delhi. Paying her twice the going rate, I still tidied up before her visits. Many western friends acted similarly, while Indians mocked our gullibility and complained that we made things difficult for them by raising employees' expectations.

But as Indians join the modern world, it is right that when we soppy westerners go there we should still live by the compassionate values that we espouse here.

We are right to feel shocked by the chasm between rich and poor on India's teeming streets — and to respond with humane instincts that might shame Indians into behaving better themselves. Try to remember that during your lavish, show-off wedding, eh Brangelina?